Official Description
Many are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s theory of the
hero’s journey, the idea that every man from Moses to Hercules grows to
adulthood, battling his alter-ego. This book explores the universal
heroine’s journey as she quests through world myth. Numerous stories
from cultures as varied as Chile and Vietnam reveal heroines who
battle for safety and identity, thereby upsetting popular notions of the
passive, gentle heroine. Only after she has defeated her dark side and
reintegrated can the heroine become the bestower of wisdom, the
protecting queen and arch-crone.

What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this
unified earth as one harmonious being?” Joseph Campbell asks. The fragmentation
and violence in the world reflect the sublimation of the largest minority
existent in religion, spirituality, and everyday life: Womankind. For the first
time since prehistory, women across the earth are evolving into their natural
place as man’s equal, invoking the Goddess, and protecting the sanctity of life
by reclaiming the heroine’s journey.

Campbell believed that while the hero represented the logical, assertive side of
the personality, encountering the feminine blessed him with creativity, empathy,
and intuition. However, neither side of this equation represents the heroine on
her archetypal quest, descending into death and revitalizing as Mother Goddess.
This active heroine dominates holy books from the Mahabharata to the
Nihongi, as well as fairytales like the ubiquitous Cinderella. Even the
great epics offer us Antigone, Medea, Pele and Hi’iaka, the Devi-māhātmyam,
Hymn to Demeter and The Descent of Ishtar.

Cinderella-like, the girl grows up sheltered. Soon enough, however, she’s forced
out. Her brothers are ensorcelled into swans, or the Fairy Queen steals her
lover. Her quest to reunite the family has arrived. Practical and often cruel,
her mentor guides her to wield a magic thread or slippers, a chalice or
cauldron, girdle or hoop. “Every step you take will pierce like knives,” the Sea
Witch warns. What are weaving nettle coats or walking barefoot to the land of
death compared with childbirth?

Her
shapechanging lover represents her submerged animus, the intellectual masculine
aspect of herself she must integrate before reconnecting with the feminine.
After penetrating his scaly serpent skin, the heroine embarks on her perilous
descent. In the underworld waits Hecate, the witch-queen, Medea, the
death-dealing mother. Lilith, devourer of babies. Facing her, the heroine
confronts the cruel side of motherhood: violence, sexuality, overbearing
control, terror of aging. In short, the Terrible Mother is her shadow —sterile,
waning death in place of life and thus all the youthful heroine must yet
experience.

Claiming her loved one, the questor ascends to Goddess, terrible and beneficent,
matriarch of death as well as life. She becomes Gaia, with all life springing
from her body. Changing Woman, Navaho mother of humanity. She is Devi, the
imaginative force throughout the world, but also balances her darker aspects:
Kali, Tiamat, Caillech, Baba Yaga, Gunabibi.

In
fact, the new age we enter is not that of Yeats’ “Rough Beast,” as Campbell
suggested, but the era of the far-fiercer integrated Goddess. She is the
emerging international sensibility toward human rights and ecology, the life
cycle incarnate. She, who has dwelt fragmented into victimized Persephone,
gentle Kwan-Yin, sublimated Mary, passive Gaia, vilified Medusa, is rising once
more.

The young questing heroine seeks to become the Great
Mother, balancing strength with creativity, logic with intuition. She is a
vessel of emerging power, for which the feminine was once worshipped: The woman’s
power is as different from the man’s as yin and yang, but not inferior. Lucy
from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Morgaine from The Mists
of Avalon could hardly be considered lacking in “brains.” Yet they also have
the creative power to affect the world, Lucy though faith and Morgaine through
magic. These women do not quest for their missing masculine side, nor do they
take on boys’ roles, cutting themselves off from emotion in favor of strength.
They quest to advance themselves on their personal journeys (as do the boys) and
to become nurturing leaders.

The true goal of the heroine’s journey is to become the
archetypal, all-powerful mother. Thus, many heroines set out on rescue missions
in order to restore their shattered families: Eliza must save her six brothers
from a lifetime as swans, Lyra of The Golden Compass must find her best
friend. Both heroines battle torture and death to restore their families and win
true love. Demeter forces herself into the realm of the dead to reclaim her
daughter, while Isis scours the world for her husband’s broken body. Little
Gerda in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale quests all the way to Finland to rescue
her playmate from the unfeeling Snow Queen. Though the goal is beloved family
members or potential husbands, these heroines work as hard as any fairy tale
heroes.

This goal does not indicate by any means that the girls are
trying to “stay at home” or “play house.” The heroes are challenging their
fathers, the metaphorical king of the family. In hero’s journey stories, heroes
kill powerful male monsters to represent the ascendency of the son of the father
while growing up. The heroines likewise are replacing their mothers: sometimes
as helpers and wisewomen, sometimes goddesses and powerful queens. While the
father is an archetype of success and power in the outside world, the mother
represents power in the inside world of the home. The girl must eventually face
her shadow-self, the child-devouring witch, in order to pass through death into
maturity.

In ancient times, the mother goddess of fertility and the
earth was worshipped as the ultimate creator. Girls emulate that path on their
journeys by forming a family circle in which they can rule as supreme nurturer
and protector. Some, like Demeter, care for many subjects, while others only
protect a small group. Just as the hero can become the king of the Danes or a
shaman for a small tribe, the key is self-mastery and wisdom.